The thinker & the scribe

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
By John Matteson
Norton, 497 pp., illustrated, $29.95

"To the extent that a written page permits knowledge of a different time and departed souls, this book has tried to reveal them," John Matteson writes at the end of his absorbing "Eden's Outcasts," about the Alcott family of 19th-century Concord and Boston. The revelations that Matteson provides us with, of souls alive in a time superficially quite unlike ours, never flag in interest. The story moves briskly from just before the century's beginning, in November 1799, when Bronson Alcott was born in a Connecticut hilltop farmhouse, all the way to 1888, near century's end, with Bronson's death in Boston in a home in Louisburg Square. The father's death was followed two days later by that of his famous daughter, Louisa May Alcott, beloved author of "Little Women."

The many readers of that classic novel for young people will be well positioned to enter the world that "Eden's Outcasts" describes, and those who have read Geraldine Brooks's recent, splendid, best-selling novel "March" will also have prepared themselves to experience the wonderful narrative that Matteson unfolds. But really, Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City, tells his story so clearly and attractively that no previous acquaintance with the remarkable Alcott clan and their various, equally remarkable friends is needed to relish their world as he re-creates it.

The title, "Eden's Outcasts," refers to the failed utopian aspirations of the family, most notably at Fruitlands, near Harvard. Even now, Fruitlands is one of the most beautiful sites in New England, maintained in part as a memorial to the Alcotts' experiment in ideal, self-sustained living. The family came there with high hopes in the early summer of 1843 and left, in dismal shape, soon after the arrival of December's icy blasts. Vividly, affectingly, Matteson describes one family's struggle to live their lives with meaning, without taint or exploitation. And that is but one of the many inspiring episodes that are given full and able treatment here.

Throughout, the focus is on a father and his famous daughter, contrasting people fated to spend their years together as they learn to value each other for what each is. Bronson was an educator who practiced methods of instruction so far ahead of his time that he all but doomed himself to failure. In the 1830s, his progressive school in Boston was effectively shut down after he enrolled an African-American child among his students. Ralph Waldo Emerson befriended the educator, helped get his family set up in Concord, and concluded that the self-taught Bronson possessed the most brilliant mind he had ever encountered. And he was the finest conversationalist as well, that latter excellence, of course, irrecoverable. His written prose, by contrast, survives maybe too copiously, as a challenge in all the wrong ways. Here in his late teens, for instance, Bronson is writing to his mother and father, pleased to learn that they are "in circumstances affluent enough to preclude the idea of complaining." As Matteson notes, the first paragraph of the filial letter goes on to regale scarcely literate parents with such words as "perusal," "dissimulation," and "felicitated," the young man unerringly choosing the elaborate over the simple and straightforward. Nor does Bronson's writing get much better until very late in his long life. By all accounts he spoke like an angel, but in the act of setting his thoughts down, he too often turned them to mush.

Bronson's daughter Louisa was something quite different, in every way. The father was blond, she was dark. He was serene, she was excitable. He was idealistic, she was practical. He tended toward the universal, she dealt with specifics. Bronson's prose is virtually devoid of humor, whereas Louisa's is filled with it. Yet it is among the many merits of Matteson's study that not only does "Eden's Outcasts" cause us to revaluate Louisa's achievement upward, but it also leads us to understand the high esteem in which her often exasperating father was held by his contemporaries. The narrative manages the even more difficult feat of raising our own opinion of one too easily dismissed as a dreamy idealist, a man whose crotchets survive all too clearly in the record, whereas his living virtues have long since disappeared.

In the course of the Alcott story we reside in Boston in the exciting times of the 1850s, with the abolition movement raging and Bronson playing an active role in furthering its aims. The story follows Louisa to Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, re-creating the appalling ambience of a makeshift military hospital, where at age 30 she served as a nurse to wounded soldiers until typhoid brought her down and the treatment of mercury to cure it wrecked her health from that point forward. We are given attractive vignettes of the Alcotts' illustrious Concord neighbors: Henry David Thoreau, the Emersons, the Nathaniel Hawthornes living just down the road. And we are on hand for the thrilling, almost inadvertent success of "Little Women," which finally lifted an admirable, devoted family out of their long years of poverty into a prosperity that was to be theirs to the last. Sadness would come to them in those late years, inevitably; but for the moment all their struggles seemed to have led to a happy ending, capping with ultimate comfort a narrative of resourcefulness amid much deprivation, a story abundantly relevant to our own overstimulated, perhaps overcosseted times.

Philip McFarland is the author of "Hawthorne in Concord" and the forthcoming "Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe."